NASA's Dawn asteroid hunter has returned the first photo of Vesta since achieving orbit around the giant object at the end of last week.
The snap (big version here) was grabbed at a distance of 9,900 miles (16,000 kilometres), and shows Vesta's impressive 530 kilometre (330 mile) diameter bulk beginning to come into focus. …

@Clangers

@Clangers 2

Also they were on a "small planet somewhere in space" IIRC. Clearly that was before Pluto was so shockingly demoted, so it (and Cares, if it's big enough) may be in with a chance, I don't think this one ever counted as a planet.

That's

It certainly isn't...

Fuzzy

Dissapointing, seems rather fuzzy.

I wonder what the cammera the sensor size and focal length are (unless it's some sort of scanned sensor). By my calculation 16000km away 530km diameter should cover approx 1.9 deg which would roughly fill a 36mm frame with a 1000mm lens.

@Fuzzy

The resolution of the camera is actually not too brilliant (1024 x 1024). But I imagine those sneaky boffins know what they are up to. Things should get quite a lot sharper when the spacecraft gets much nearer to Vesta. And since it will be in orbit for quite a while, who knows, they may be able to artificially increase the resolution from multiple passes.

Close-ups?

Isn't this close to the perfect snap? Surely, when the probe is at closest approach, it will send thousands of detailed pictures, each of 1 square km of surface, or something - doubtless invaluable to the scientists looking for evidence to support their pet theories of planetary evolution, but hardly the stuff that makes newspaper headlines.

Unless, of course, they manage to snap somebody snapping them.

Personally, I'm more interested in Phobos, with its interestingly low density which MIGHT just suggest that there are hollow spaces inside. It's time we investigated that.